Spirits, vampires, ghosts

Moment has come to talk about the Undead. Entities exist and live
when they are perceived: existing because the Other is there, depending
on it. If an Entity is copied, it exists. If it is played it exists.
Reproduction contains various levels of actualization.

Esisto
quando sono altro da me, esisto in quanto riflesso o semplicemente
perche’ qualcuno mi vede o mi pensa. Oppure non esisto affatto. Posso
esistere senza neanche accorgeremene, esistenza latente laterale. Non
esisto piu’, ma se qualcuno crede alla mia esistenza allora la mia
non-presenza acquista un’essenza materiale nella dimensione della
memoria. L’immagine come memoria, sovrapposizione del pensiero.

I
said earlier Zombies are Souls of Entities no longer embodied, whose
instantiation is lost. That was not proper. Zombies are all those files
that are dead. Defining this death is, yet, to be accomplished. Spirit
is the capability of an Entity to exist, the external gift of believing
in life which makes life. A spectrum can be a better definition of a
Soul without body. A zombie is a reanimated corpse, and those have
relations with the fact of being remotely controlled, like robots. A
ghost is the disembodied spirit or soul of a deceased person.

I do not know yet what is a Zombie in Virtual Entity’s world.

Schema:

var int n, file, anima;
body(file)+soul(anima);
entity(liberated.life,exist);
animation, animate++;
entity(soul,body);


if file>0, file++ {
anima=0;
* what is life? *
give me another life
life=donate;
liberate.soul(entity);
mortifer=(nosoul,nolife);
mortifer.entity=death;
darwinfy=bestentity;
(spectrality);
* no love but procreation *
prot(play ;; copy);
sukion, suko++;
play.entity(prot,1);
copy.entity(prot,2);
suko=suko++;
sukion;
* i can have more than one Soul *
entity[(soul+soul)+body];
body.soul.soul;
body++;
}

 

-written in Maastricht-

The launch of imaginary property on paper

Undermining
the borders between text and image, between private property and public
space through the design of ‘imaginary’ advertisements and (ironically)
deconstructing some of the basic conventions of a magazine, Imaginary
Property is curating the 77 issue of HTV-De-IJsberg, investigating new
fields of image-production beyond the hard-coded notions of the
commercial versus the editorial.

The € 33.000,- issue

On January 30th, 2009, the 77th issue of HTV De Ijsberg was launched at a session of Killer TV at the De Waag, Center for old and new media
in Amsterdam. The entire magazine is devoted to questions of "Imaginary
property". It has been edited and compiled by the researchers of the
"imaginary property" research group at Jan van Eyck Academie Maastricht
in close collaboration with the editorial team of HTV. The magazine as
well as additional material can be visited and downloaded at: http://www.htvdeijsberg.nl

They’ve got a bomb!

They’ve Got A Bomb‘ is an occasion for showing our support to victims of massive and blind bombing on Gaza, and also against the
experimentation of new american weapons over disarmed populations. The
new nickname of the bomb is DIME.     

Close Souls, Open Source

This is the second last day of the coding week, the prototype rush by Megabug and me, sponsored by the Design department of Jan van Eyck Academy
(many thanks!). The sun is shining and we would really love some
walking in the bush, since the whole landscape is white and silver, and
the snow has covered the country.

SQL

I am studying SQL, it is now 2009. In a few days the first coding
week will start! My head is all over the places, I am changing house,
moving stuff around. Thanks to the support of Jan van Eyck, Megabug
will come to help me in Kanne, the new home for Ubik and me. Here you
can see our development plan:


– data analysis (metadata fields)
– database structure
– pilot database pool

python application (command line) to make operations on the database
(Souls inserting, metadata management, genetic relations and
inheritance)
– debugging (code freeze)
– download-able package
– users community
– population of the database

It
will be a very intense working week. Before he comes, which means
tomorrow, I would like to state the final metadata field, and the
minimal pilot. Our first meeting will be about the ‘database
structure’. After that, we will start with the python application.

I am looking forward to some coding :)

-written in Amsterdam-

LA CANZONE DEL PUGILE

Ed eccoci tornati in Olanda, Ubik ed io. Un viaggio a fari spenti nella notte attraverso l’Europa ghiaggiata, la pioggia la neve e la mia collezione di bestemmie. Ci siamo persi in Francia, in mezzo a crepes e pezzi di stronzo. Ne siamo usciti, per arrivare a Kanne, la nostra ghiacciata nuova casa in campagna!

Execute

I tend to think of software as open source software, so that the source
of the software is basically text. But i might be wrong, there is
windows and .exe files, and .jar and more and more. What can I do with
them? Is software Polumetis like Ulysses? Is software
requiring metadata? The question whether considering software text or
not is becoming every minute more controversial in my mind.

Da grande (faro’ il pompiere)

There has been a time I was seriously wondering "Who am I?"

Sometimes I see people at this stage, and I feel maximum -extreme- concern for them.

My mum used to be a busy lady, four children and a full time work, plus a social life. I often talked about abstract systems to her, while she was cooking. She used to wear her coat, while cooking, or that’s what I remember… She was so fast, that I am sure more than once I had to ask her to take off her hat, while cutting onions. I was very small, probably seven years old, when, one day, in front of the fire, I told her: "Mum, I think I know about my future… I will travel a lot, and write, and…"

"Oh, that’s a journalist, do you want to be a journalist?". I said: "Nooo, that’s not what I am, that’s not what I mean…". She called daddy, smoking in front of TV, in the next room. "Yes, if you travel and write, you’ll probably be a journalist". My brother came, so tall. He started to laugh at me: "Ahaha! Babele will be a journalist!". No matter what I would say to defend my profession, they could not understand. "But I will write… not only text, something else, something more…"

I could not explain. I became sad, no one understood me, I had a vision, thus I didn’t know  much about it. I felt lonely, and I refused food. As ever, I didn’t sit in front of TV, but hid beneath the table, reading a book.

Years later, I was almost eight-teen. I ask around: "Who am I?"

No one answered. I ask my teachers, always the same answer: "You can do what you want." My favourite teacher, the one I would trust, spent few words for me, while I’d run after him over the corridors, repeating: "Maestro…". "You can basically do what you want. You can be a doctor, a scientist, a criminal, a bagger, also a thief…"

Some days later, I decided. We met again, in the same corridors. I was collecting the papers to leave the school. "Have you decided what to do?"

"Yes, I will be an artist."

"Ahah! That’s difficult, that’s the most difficult decision. Good luck."

Ciao…

I left.

New Media Meetings

Every second Wednesday of the month, at Goldsmiths college in New
Cross, London, some people are meeting to discuss, around a table,
different projects and researches concerning media art and related
fields of inspection. On November 12th Gabriel Menotti presented a very
interesting text entitled ‘Computation as dynamic topography’, part of
his research at University of Sao Paulo. His approach is presenting
computation as a specif process that cannot be described as simple
text, because, in short, computation is a dynamic event happening
inside a machine, thus it is not text in itself, and probably software
should not be defined as text at all. On November 26th the project Virtual Entity
will be presented and discussed. The door is open and any interested
person is welcome to come in and participate, we are gathering at 18:00
at Whitehead Building, room 117.